music, charts, opinions

You may remember that last summer the noted TV game show host Donald Trump announced he was running for president. Because he is a “straight-shooting” “outsider” who “tells it like it is,” he decided it would be a good idea to launch his campaign by insulting Mexican immigrants. (Actually, what percentage of Trump’s actions spring from conscious decision making is open to debate and armchair psychoanalysis, but that’s a different blog.) A bunch of other Republican candidates, being “confident” “Christian” “human beings” who “think for themselves,” decided they would also insult Mexican immigrants. And Syrian immigrants. And Central and South American immigrants, just as, when ebola was all the rage, they wanted us to ban travel to and from Africa. These people know how to discriminate against, but among? Not so much.

Since then NorteñoBlog has seen a healthy number of pro-Latino and, in some cases, anti-Trump songs. The latest comes from blog fave Marco Flores and hyphy-not-hyphy stalwarts Los Inquietos del Norte. With his Numero 1 Banda Jerez, Flores made NorteñoBlog’s favorite album and single of 2015; he’s a proud Zacatecan country dude who fills his songs with crass jokes and parties. When he first arrived on the scene a decade ago, Billboardlauded him for “tell[ing] it like it is.” Like Sr. Trump, he’s also a straight-shooting outsider, saying in a Triunfo magazine cover story that, unlike many of his banda-music colleagues, he doesn’t like El Norte. Flores claims he couldn’t afford to live here; he’d need to buy a car; in Mexico he can just ride his horse wherever he needs to go. The straight-shooting outsider is still an attentive modern businessman, though — dude can quickly rattle off his YouTube counts.

In contrast, Los Inquietos may have cousins in Jalisco and Michoacan, but they’ve based most of their 20-year music career in California. Besides devising new and innovative ways to chinga tu madre in song, they’re enterprising businessmen, starting their own Eagle label and bringing their own crass corridos to fans throughout the U.S. Their new duet with Flores, “Requisito Americano,” addresses this cultural difference before uniting in solidarity: If you discriminate against them, “salude a su madre.” I guess they wanna get this song on the radio.